Mother Nature made it nearly impossible to produce disappointing Long Island wines last year. The outstanding vintage set the stage for especially rewarding white-wine drinking this year, when the 2010s will be released. Reds will mature in oak barrels for two or more years.
The rising quality of dry and off-dry whites (as well as cabernet franc, a red) has challenged the hoary notion that the East End is chiefly merlot country. Ambitious sparkling wines are also catching on, and alluring French-style rosés, which flatter maritime cuisine, are proliferating.
Local vintners are striving to create signature wines by defining and transmitting their terroirs: the mix of soils, topography and climate that gives wines particular characters. Chardonnays, sauvignon blancs and rieslings that experience minimal intervention in winemaking and are reared in steel tanks and neutral barrels can express terroir nicely. New oak can mask it.
Top-notch wineries like Bedell Cellars, Channing Daughters, Macari Vineyards, Shinn Estate Vineyards and Wölffer Estate Vineyard seem particularly attuned to the specifics of terroir. Their cellar methods seem to be adjusting to those specifics. There is a tier of less prominent producers whose 2010 wines are also likely to be inviting. It includes Anthony Nappa Wines, Bouké Wines, Clovis Point Wines, Comtesse Thérèse, Diliberto Winery, Jason’s Vineyard, Mattebella Vineyards, McCall Wines, Onabay Vineyards, Roanoke Vineyards, Suhru Wines and Waters Crest Winery. The new year brings the industry a potential downside. State budget constraints may prevent the New York Wine and Grape Foundation, a trade association, from subsidizing the Long Island Wine Council, a trade group, at the current level of almost $24,000. That kind of cutback would force vintners to spend more of their own money on marketing, raising the prospect of higher prices.
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